So i decided I want to play rotation-style instead of following my whim. Or at least try it out. (Until now I just made sure children of the same generation stayed roughly within the same age category, but the "system" backfired on me when I played nationwide events and they happened in winter for one family and in summer for their neighbors in the same subhood. Ouch. Global warming is unpredictable and scary ). I think I´ll play each household for one season.

So here´s my question: How many days pass at your college for each day that passes in your main neighborhood?
A) One neighborhood day = One college day. I do not really consider this.
B) One neighborhood day = One college year
C) One neighborhood day = One college semester
D) other

I´m not just interested in your solution, but also very much in why you chose it, how it worked for you and your experiences with it so I can make an informed decision.

I'm about to start up a new rotation style neighborhood and I'd like to include professors in its society (sims that remain in the university neighborhood using the Resident Graduates flavor pack for the inteenimator). I play with no maxis jobs, so the role of universities tends to me much more limited in my hoods. For example, I have a big institutional religion like the medieval Catholic Church in my neighborhood, but you have to have a degree in philosophy to be a priest, and a couple of the guilds (built around simwardrobe's vocational training object) might require them, like a degree in mathematics to join the register guild or a degree in physics to join the robotics guild. By playing with these "professors," sims staying at the university and making money writing scholarly books or running community lot businesses, I can use more of the university life features-- it seems a shame to waste them, they're a fun element of the game.

As a result I'm actually likely to go with option A in this new hood, since the resident graduates pack theroetically allows sims that stay there to age normally and have children on university lots. Option A seems like the only way to keep the timeline intact

I have always played that one neighborhood day = one year. (I interpret the very long pregnancies as family planning.) From being in college myself, I know that 2 semesters = 1 year. (Not counting summer semester, which is usually not required to graduate on time.) Therefore, 1 neighborhood day = 2 semesters.

I will play a kid through Uni and play their parents for 4 neighborhood days. The ages seem to be about right, relatively speaking, when they come home after graduation. I find this easy to remember and easy to implement.

Something to bear in mind, though, is that every time you start a new household, the season will reset. For example: My seasons run Spring-Summber-Fall-Winter. Rose is living with her parents, and it is Fall. Rose decides to move out with her new husband, and they move into a new house with lots of room for kidlets. The season at their new house is Spring, because that is the beginning of the cycle. You can get hacks to force things to line up, but personally I just handwave it.

For me, one neighborhood day = one semester, or eight neighborhood days = whole college career. So Sims who decide to go to college leave when there are 8 days left until they become an adult. I do this so that if two Sims are the same age and one goes to college and the other doesn't, they will still be the same age when the Sims grow up into adults. I also have a mod where I shortened each semester to 2 days, so the Sims who go to college will only get 8 days "extra" of life. This also helps to keep my Sims from all getting 4.0 GPAs. I have only done this once so far, since only the second generation of my hood went to college and the third is still too young, but I liked how it worked out for me. Most of my Sims go to college anyways.

I've started using the hack that lets sims attend college while still living at home. I should keep count and see how many 'real' days college actually takes.

I play the main hood as 1 day = 6 months. For uni I use a 48 hour mod so each semester is 2 days long instead of 3. This makes uni 16 days long instead of the game setting of 24 days. So game wise for me this means uni is 8 years long. So still rather long, but not to a ridiculous extent. Medical school I believe does take in real life 6 years. So I don't feel 8 for sims is too out there, they aren't that smart after all. When I play my uni rotation I play them for a season just like I do the main hood.

I usually play 5-day rotations(occasionally 1-day, but that's only if I have a special scenario in mind and need more finesse with the sim ages) with each rotation corresponding to a season(I manually change the seasons, so I don't have some houses enjoying summer while others are in the middle of winter). College lasts for 5 sim days(one for each semester, and one for the bonus graduation semester), though if I'm feeling lazy I might fudge things to match the returning student to the start or end of a rotation. Consequently, I move them out to college 5 days before they're due to age up, because they're teens for long enough as it is. It's not perfect, and requires a bit of note-keeping, but it's what I've found to be the best compromise between micromanaging and nonsensical out-of-sync aging for my gameplay.

I usually don't play the family household while the kids are in college. I like the children to know their grand-parents and live with them for a while. College is just too long compared to the "regular" days in the main neighbourhood. I send my teens to college just before their birthday, so baby, toddler, child, teen plus counting the time spent in college would mean they would graduate just to come home and see their parents die, more or less.
So with one child only, I don't play the main household at all. With siblings, I respect their difference in days so they keep the same age difference. Like, if Puck is eleven days older than Bottom, after he leaves for college, I'll play the main household eleven days before I send her to uni, or when he comes back, I'll play him and their parents eleven days before I bring Bottom back. Or 5 days after he leaves and then 6 days before she comes home, or whatever keeps the age difference right.
It works for me, but then again all my teens go to college, so there is no discrepancy in a generation.

I play on a season rotation. Each season = 3 college semesters. I count the bonus 72hrs after a sim graduates as a semester, so I play each regular household a total of three seasons before the YA returns from college. I tried both 2 semesters = a season and 4 semesters = a season before settling on 3. At 2 semesters = a season I felt my sims were in college way too long; at 4 semesters = a season I felt like I wasn't giving my YA sims a proper chance to mingle with other playable sims in college since they were kind of going in and graduating in batches. Not to mention I like that 3 works out evenly If a sim drops out I just leave them in the sim bin until the season they were supposed to move back comes around. This way they don't age faster than the other sims their age and are subject to a certain penalty by dropping out (and not getting to 'play' those days and skill, etc.).

Just adding, I'm now seeing how it works for kids not going to uni, to be young adults in the main hood but never start the semester clock. They can have the same 16 days as YA as the uni kids but without doing uni. This way they can age in sync with their friends who did go to uni.

I don't have a university in my BACC yet, but I'm planning to do two years of college for one week of hood time. Sims who are going to go to college will have to go right away, and then everything stays in sync, only with some sims being teens while others are young adults.

In my neighborhood, one college year (2 semesters) is a day in the neighborhood, since 'days' are actually more like years. My rotations consist of two days in every household, which means I have to play uni for two consecutive years. It can get annoying, but at least they get done with college faster.

I have a 48 hour semester mod, so I play 2 uni days = 1 regular day. My uni rotations are twice as long as my regular rotations. This means that sims are YAs for 16 uni days or 8 regular days; I send them to uni 4 days before becoming adults and when they come back, set them to 4 days into adulthood, so they're in sync with their siblings.

Ofc, I'm going to have to come up with another solution when I start doing uni at home . I think most of my home-studying sims will probably be adults going back to uni though, so I could just pass off the extra days as them studying part time and working.

Unless you start the uni clock it stays at 48 hours until exams, so I'm going to take advantage of that. I think that will work better than independent teens.

Except if you aren't playing them through Uni then when you age them up to adult they'll have a memory of dropping out of Uni.

This is how I run it.



To me this makes the most since on how to handle it.

College is one of my favorite times in a Sim's live and about the only time I tolerate having loads of people in my household. It's just so much fun to spice things up and see my *cough* children interact with eachother.

Despite that, college IS way too long to do every generation. Thanks to a mod, a semester takes 36 hours, which is about right. They usually go home after the final exams. So, in total, my Sims spend twelve days in college. They move to campus a couple of days before adulthood and usually I play about six days in my main neighborhood. Because of that, graduated sims will be slightly younger than their peers, but that seems just right: on average, people with a degree, at least in my country, live significantly longer than people without one.

For me 1 neighbourhood day = 1 university year (2 semesters)

I also have that "faster university" mod some people mentioned (link here), but I have set it to 24 hours. Yeah, I like it really short (and it also gets the whole thing a bit harder, which I love), so I don't have the feeling that I'm playing university lots foreeeeeever just to keep the whole thing syncronized.
I absolutely LOVE that mod.

I let my Sims to go to University (if they did want to) when they have 5 days left as teens. (Because I let them grow when they have 1 day left, so it kept all syncronized).

This works just perfect for me.

I’m with those who play as if one day equals one year and two semesters at college equals one year. In the main neighborhood I play one day per house for each rotation. I play the college rotations per semester. My semesters are three days since I don’t use anything to shorten them. I play one semester per house or dorm. Then I cycle through another college rotation for the second semester to complete the year. After that I go back to the main neighborhood again and start the next year.

I play with 48 hour semesters and only 4 semesters (one for each year). That way I can send my teens who are going to uni (since not all do, thanks to entrance requirements and tuition fees) at 8 days until their birthday. Then those who don't go spend that time as independent teens and they all stay the same age.

I came up with this calculation as the best way to keep sim ages in rough correspondence with realistic human ones. Of course with 8 days of uni, they're still in college until they're 25 but it was the best I could do! This is also the perfect amount of time to keep me invested in their university time but not bored of it going on too long.

I then have Master and Doctorate degrees which add their own extended time, but that's a story for another place!

That's the only drawback that I can see so far. Not sure how to get around that.


Do you know where the 36 hour mod comes from? Do you find that a struggle at all? I know if I tried 24 that too many would fail out as my sims don't normally have a heap of skills and I only play to wants during uni.


I'd like to know more about what you do for that.

Proportional Aging (Almighty Hat) http://hat-plays-sims.dreamwidth.org/23906.html plus two day semester, one day=one day.

I play with Inteen and ACR and have many college families, so this keeps everybody aligned. Joe Sim who doesn't go to college and his twin John Sim who does will both become adults on the same day.

I don't have an actual system; It's usually something like this; if someone has a baby around the same time as I send a class to college, the class graduates when said baby becomes a child

thank you all for your input! I was undecided between B and C, but now ´m strongly leaning towards a solution that doesn´t count the elapsed days but seasons.
Most of my sims attend college for two 2 years only (I call it military service or trade school and some are the servants of the actual students - whatever fits the character) and then drop out, only nobility and prodigy graduate. So if two college years equaled one season I would play one rotation without the kids and have the majority of them back home in the next.

I may have to sleep over the final decision, but at least made up my mind to try that 48-hours-mod As a side effect that will bring Club Autumn Crocus with their eternal fall season many new applicants and House of Glory will be furious.

My rule of thumb: one season in neighborhood time is four full years at Uni. So, if a Sim goes off to college and comes back home, everybody else in the neighborhood should have gone forward a full season. I don't painstakingly play a couple of days in every house, then play a freshman through a couple of years. Once I have a bunch of teens ready for college, I let them go through it in 'classes' -- usually one or two every uni-year -- until I've run out of ready teens, and then I return to the neighborhood to play some families forward.